I'd say the difference is that BSG and Firefly don't pretend to focus on the tech. Most problems in BSG/Firefly are solved with technology that:
Exists (or is on the very near horizon) OR
Is one of a small number of "magic" technologies, usually introduced in an innocuous fashion long before it became an essential plot element
Star Trek didn't limit itself to a small or particularly understandable set of "magic" technologies. Many episodes had a bit of magic as the cause of a problem, with another piece of magic as the solution. And usually both of them had never been seen before and were never seen again. In the few cases where magic was reused, they pretended it wasn't: As another commenter notes, an inverse tachyon pulse from the main deflector was required to solve problems constantly, but somehow it always had to be jury rigged at the last second, and it was always a nail biting effort.
BSG's only consistent "magic" nail biters were things like last second jump calculations, which were clearly indicated as something that had to be done differently if either start or end coordinates changed, and was introduced in advance. Firefly just had problems getting the damn engine started; no real sci-fi required (it was, for all intents and purposes, the plot equivalent of an IC engine).
Paraphrasing Hitchcock (by way of JMS), if someone gets shot in Act 3, you need to show the gun hanging over the mantelpiece in Act 1. By and large, BSG (and to a lesser extent Firefly) did this. Star Trek just pulled random guns out of dark crevices in every act, no foreshadowing required.
you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony.
I'm probably being excessively pedantic, but you don't need a class action suit to have "legal recourse." It's just easier as a class. You can sue on your own if your property was damaged or a contract was violated.
One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
Wouldn't the moon be accreted from the ring? Why would Phoebe be shedding material? My understanding was that many rocky bodies in the solar system are formed by accretions from rings such as this, and once a sufficiently large body is formed, the ring begins to disappear as it falls onto the body or is flung out of orbit by the gravitational influence of said body. Can someone say why the articles think the process is going in reverse?
Yes. Just like everyone else, you're a better than average driver, better than average multitasker, etc. No matter how many studies are conducted clearly indicating that reaction time is slowed and attention impaired (in some cases to levels worse than driving with a moderate level of alcohol in the system), you are somehow the exception.
No matter how many/.ers post their own "I'm good enough to do it" screeds, because so far they've been lucky, the fact remains: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
That said, I'm not perfect. While I have not talked on a cell phone (hands free or otherwise) in 15 months, this has more to do with living in Manhattan and not owning a car than anything else. Prior to that, I did use the Bluetooth integration in my car to make and receive occasional phone calls. And I know it was dangerous, but like virtually everyone else, I tended to ignore the danger in favor of convenience.
I am 100% innocent of texting (sending or receiving) while driving though, and I never dialed a call while driving that wasn't a one button speed dial (done by touch). That takes mind-numbing amounts of stupidity.
They've done numerousstudies that say you're wrong. Holding the phone is an additional distraction, but there is still a significant difference between talking on a cell (hands free or otherwise) and talking to a passenger. For one, your passenger can say "watch out!" if you lose focus and start to drift; your phone cannot. For another, people need to focus more on phone calls; the fidelity isn't as good on either end so they need to focus on hearing and being heard more than in an in person conversation. You know all those people who talk 20 decibels louder than normal on a cell, even though no recent cell phone benefits significantly from the additional volume? They've focused on the call (and being heard) so much that they forget to self-regulate. If they can't regulate the volume of their voice (a task related to the conversation), why do you think they'll be able to drive effectively?
There's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with the Japanese/African IQ observation, the conclusion you're drawing is moderately racist.
It's more than moderately racist. And beliefs of that sort become self-fulfilling prophecies when widely held. IQ studies that rigorously controlled for the effect of poverty, culture and societal prejudice are few and far between, and I've not heard of any that showed any significant disadvantage for a particular ethnic group.
IIRC, the cumulative effect of switching every "bad" intelligence linked gene we have found to it's "good" variety (excluding serious genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome and the like) only accounts for about a two point boost in IQ. Granted, we've probably missed quite a few, but there is zero evidence that intelligence linked genes are not close to uniformly distributed.
I'm impressed. Only a couple hundred names in a country of, last I checked ~80 million. The U.S. could definitely use a system like that, assuming it was equally rigorous in making sure not to add people unnecessarily.
Correction: Virtually every country (more than a couple hundred years old anyway) featured slavery (or a closely related form of cheap labor extracted involuntarily) at some point.
X (where X is a country more than two hundred years old) never had any morals. It was built on pillage and destruction of existing culture and then on slavery to bootstrap a new economy.
Fixed that for you (both the semantics and the syntax). Every country on the planet was built by the "winners," who almost always displaced prior inhabitants. Virtually every country (less than a couple hundred years old anyway) featured slavery (or a closely related form of cheap labor extracted involuntarily) at some point. No, that doesn't make it right, but as Dr. King said "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." We aren't perfect, but at least we seem to be getting better.
This doesn't have anything to do with multiple graphics cards (except insofar as you have two cards capable of rendering accelerated graphics in the machine). A card set up purely as a PhysX processor isn't using the WDDM (the Vista/Win7 display driver architecture) pathway, which requires the same driver for all graphics cards. The non-Physx card used for graphics owns that pathway, and the Physx card runs independently. The Physx card is like a RAID or USB add-on card; there's no real limit to how many you can run at once.
The restriction exists (rightly or wrongly, I don't care about passing judgment here) both as a performance and stability hack (drastically increased GPU multitasking requires a scheduler and memory manager, and it's harder to write one that works across heterogeneous cards), and to aid in "protecting" HD content by having a single video path that is tightly controlled. Since the PhysX card isn't rendering anything, the restrictions don't apply.
That said, I'm sure the 30 year old with the transplant would be happy to have any extra years. If it kills her at age 50, but keeps her alive until then, it's hard to complain.
The article doesn't address this, but I'm a little concerned by the idea of a pulseless system. On the one hand, there is no pressure spike, but on the other hand, the pressure never lets up. I'[m curious what effect this sort of device will have on strokes and other blood flow disturbances. The steady pulse-and-release rhythm constantly tugs at potential clots in different directions, presumably breaking up many incipient clots. Will a steady flow system do the same?
Sufficient quantitative differences can become qualitative ones. If a police officer is required to take time out of his day to tail a car, then it will likely be for a good reason; they simply don't have the manpower to tail people without cause. If they can just slap a GPS tracker on any car without a warrant, it becomes trivial to troll for suspects. Requiring a warrant is perfectly reasonable: If they have probable cause, they can ask a judge for a warrant. They can still install the device secretly, so the suspect isn't aware of it, but there is some level of oversight. If police aren't constrained, they *will* overstep their bounds, because their goal is to catch lawbreakers, not protect rights. It's not maliciousness (in most cases), they just prioritize law enforcement. We have judges, theoretically, to act as a check on that power, to ensure that the pursuit of lawbreakers does not unduly affect the innocent. Requiring a warrant is a perfectly reasonable way to do this.
You're not mistaken. But it demonstrates the exact problems I mentioned. When viewing sites in IE Tab, you lose all the Firefox functionality below the level of tab separation. You need plugins for each, the behavior of different tabs doesn't match (I hate losing find-as-you-type for instance), etc.
And like I noted before, the IE Tab users (usually) know what they are getting into; they have to explicitly opt in on each site. The Chrome Frame users won't be aware, as they would include a large percentage of the entire Google user base. And they don't control which sites use it; the web authors who do the blind copy'n'paste I mentioned will make the decision. It's annoying enough to lose functionality when I visit a site in IE Tab. It would be worse to experience it randomly as I browse.
Add-ons for Firefox are much more restricted than they used to be, and as a result are (usually) more stable. And since they are supposed to state versions supported, they usually deactivate cleanly for untested versions of Firefox. As for real plugins, aside from one or two major releases (none in the last year) I've rarely seen a plugin that didn't work identically after upgrade. Most browsers have some plugin compatibility problems after a major release.
The plugin soup is more of a problem if the browser behaves drastically differently as a result of the plugin. With Chrome Frame, most plugins for IE will not work with a page rendered in the Chrome Frame. Multiple copies of the plugin would need to be installed (e.g. Flash), or certain functionality that was only implemented for one browser would not be available in one or the other (e.g. some random third party text box spell checker).
Except Firefox addons are not *necessary* to use any commonly accessed websites (AdBlock Plus and NoScript may be desirable, but not necessary). As such, the people who install them are expected to be aware of potential incompatibility and can disable them if needed (for example, if AdBlock Plus blocks critical elements of a site, you can whitelist the necessary element, or just disable it on the specified site). The required knowledge level to install an addon usually means they know the basic troubleshooting needed to fix addon related problems.
If Google decides that a large number of its services require Chrome Frame, people without the necessary knowledge will be installing it to use those services. And unlike the Firefox addon users, most of them won't be competent enough to troubleshoot any problems that arise from the combined renderer, or even understand the source of the problem.
In addition, it would not surprise me to see a number of sites add the metatag without realizing the implications. Too many web developers are hacks, copying any pasting random junk from forums, reading tips out of guidebooks without understanding the context, etc. If their site's JavaScript is too slow, and a forum post says "Add this metatag to improve JavaScript performance," they'll add it without checking to see if their page is Chrome compatible.
Wow. I was off on a number of things. Mods, please mod my GP post Overrated so misinformation doesn't spread (I've got karma to blow in any event).
As for reversible computing, the Wikipedia is rather problematic. It implies power savings are possible, but the only example of a reversible system it gives (Undo operations in a word processor) are clearly not the ideal; they add to the power usage, rather than subtracting, since they cost additional memory to save state. Given the highly theoretical bent of the article, I'm not seeing this as a practical solution in the next decade or so.
The problem is the apps. Running an application means you are using the CPU, memory and/or networking functionality more often. On a smartphone that is used only intermittently for e-mail, the cost is small. If you are running a realtime GPS directions app for an hour at a time, you're using a hell of a lot more. Then add games, fully JavaScript-compatible web browsers, etc. It adds up. Even a normal cell phone runs down the battery an order of magnitude faster while talking than while it's sitting in your pocket. Running apps is more demanding, and consequently the power drains ever faster.
I know nothing about quantum well diodes, but the screens are already LED on virtually all smart phones. And their power draw would be negligible when not in use, so I doubt they have much of an influence. Pushing computing out of the phone wouldn't save much; the cost of maintaining an active connection to the network at all times would be substantially higher than the small gains made from using a lower power chip (the chips are already fairly low power). Keep in mind, there would still need to be *a* chip to do the work of maintaining the network connection and drawing to the screen; if it's just bitmap copies, then you need a lot of network communication (and possibly decompression work), if it's drawing primitives, you need more drawing capability to turn them into screen images.
Many of the more powerful apps are already in the cloud, there's not that much left to push out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the difference is that BSG and Firefly don't pretend to focus on the tech. Most problems in BSG/Firefly are solved with technology that:
Star Trek didn't limit itself to a small or particularly understandable set of "magic" technologies. Many episodes had a bit of magic as the cause of a problem, with another piece of magic as the solution. And usually both of them had never been seen before and were never seen again. In the few cases where magic was reused, they pretended it wasn't: As another commenter notes, an inverse tachyon pulse from the main deflector was required to solve problems constantly, but somehow it always had to be jury rigged at the last second, and it was always a nail biting effort.
BSG's only consistent "magic" nail biters were things like last second jump calculations, which were clearly indicated as something that had to be done differently if either start or end coordinates changed, and was introduced in advance. Firefly just had problems getting the damn engine started; no real sci-fi required (it was, for all intents and purposes, the plot equivalent of an IC engine).
Paraphrasing Hitchcock (by way of JMS), if someone gets shot in Act 3, you need to show the gun hanging over the mantelpiece in Act 1. By and large, BSG (and to a lesser extent Firefly) did this. Star Trek just pulled random guns out of dark crevices in every act, no foreshadowing required.
My dream of driving a Chryslus Motors Highwayman can now become a reality!
Finally. I was wondering how long it would take someone to make the obvious Stargate reference.
Yes, in much the same way that Jame Cameron murdered 49 people. (See point #6)
you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony.
I'm probably being excessively pedantic, but you don't need a class action suit to have "legal recourse." It's just easier as a class. You can sue on your own if your property was damaged or a contract was violated.
Ah. Much more helpful than the main article. Someone please mod the parent Informative.
One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
Wouldn't the moon be accreted from the ring? Why would Phoebe be shedding material? My understanding was that many rocky bodies in the solar system are formed by accretions from rings such as this, and once a sufficiently large body is formed, the ring begins to disappear as it falls onto the body or is flung out of orbit by the gravitational influence of said body. Can someone say why the articles think the process is going in reverse?
Yes. Just like everyone else, you're a better than average driver, better than average multitasker, etc. No matter how many studies are conducted clearly indicating that reaction time is slowed and attention impaired (in some cases to levels worse than driving with a moderate level of alcohol in the system), you are somehow the exception.
No matter how many /.ers post their own "I'm good enough to do it" screeds, because so far they've been lucky, the fact remains: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
That said, I'm not perfect. While I have not talked on a cell phone (hands free or otherwise) in 15 months, this has more to do with living in Manhattan and not owning a car than anything else. Prior to that, I did use the Bluetooth integration in my car to make and receive occasional phone calls. And I know it was dangerous, but like virtually everyone else, I tended to ignore the danger in favor of convenience.
I am 100% innocent of texting (sending or receiving) while driving though, and I never dialed a call while driving that wasn't a one button speed dial (done by touch). That takes mind-numbing amounts of stupidity.
They've done numerous studies that say you're wrong. Holding the phone is an additional distraction, but there is still a significant difference between talking on a cell (hands free or otherwise) and talking to a passenger. For one, your passenger can say "watch out!" if you lose focus and start to drift; your phone cannot. For another, people need to focus more on phone calls; the fidelity isn't as good on either end so they need to focus on hearing and being heard more than in an in person conversation. You know all those people who talk 20 decibels louder than normal on a cell, even though no recent cell phone benefits significantly from the additional volume? They've focused on the call (and being heard) so much that they forget to self-regulate. If they can't regulate the volume of their voice (a task related to the conversation), why do you think they'll be able to drive effectively?
There's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with the Japanese/African IQ observation, the conclusion you're drawing is moderately racist.
It's more than moderately racist. And beliefs of that sort become self-fulfilling prophecies when widely held. IQ studies that rigorously controlled for the effect of poverty, culture and societal prejudice are few and far between, and I've not heard of any that showed any significant disadvantage for a particular ethnic group.
IIRC, the cumulative effect of switching every "bad" intelligence linked gene we have found to it's "good" variety (excluding serious genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome and the like) only accounts for about a two point boost in IQ. Granted, we've probably missed quite a few, but there is zero evidence that intelligence linked genes are not close to uniformly distributed.
I'm impressed. Only a couple hundred names in a country of, last I checked ~80 million. The U.S. could definitely use a system like that, assuming it was equally rigorous in making sure not to add people unnecessarily.
Correction: Virtually every country (more than a couple hundred years old anyway) featured slavery (or a closely related form of cheap labor extracted involuntarily) at some point.
X (where X is a country more than two hundred years old) never had any morals. It was built on pillage and destruction of existing culture and then on slavery to bootstrap a new economy.
Fixed that for you (both the semantics and the syntax). Every country on the planet was built by the "winners," who almost always displaced prior inhabitants. Virtually every country (less than a couple hundred years old anyway) featured slavery (or a closely related form of cheap labor extracted involuntarily) at some point. No, that doesn't make it right, but as Dr. King said "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." We aren't perfect, but at least we seem to be getting better.
Clearly all that felon blood makes them more susceptible to the violent, drug using influence of video games!
It's a joke people, chill out.
This doesn't have anything to do with multiple graphics cards (except insofar as you have two cards capable of rendering accelerated graphics in the machine). A card set up purely as a PhysX processor isn't using the WDDM (the Vista/Win7 display driver architecture) pathway, which requires the same driver for all graphics cards. The non-Physx card used for graphics owns that pathway, and the Physx card runs independently. The Physx card is like a RAID or USB add-on card; there's no real limit to how many you can run at once.
The restriction exists (rightly or wrongly, I don't care about passing judgment here) both as a performance and stability hack (drastically increased GPU multitasking requires a scheduler and memory manager, and it's harder to write one that works across heterogeneous cards), and to aid in "protecting" HD content by having a single video path that is tightly controlled. Since the PhysX card isn't rendering anything, the restrictions don't apply.
That said, I'm sure the 30 year old with the transplant would be happy to have any extra years. If it kills her at age 50, but keeps her alive until then, it's hard to complain.
The article doesn't address this, but I'm a little concerned by the idea of a pulseless system. On the one hand, there is no pressure spike, but on the other hand, the pressure never lets up. I'[m curious what effect this sort of device will have on strokes and other blood flow disturbances. The steady pulse-and-release rhythm constantly tugs at potential clots in different directions, presumably breaking up many incipient clots. Will a steady flow system do the same?
Sufficient quantitative differences can become qualitative ones. If a police officer is required to take time out of his day to tail a car, then it will likely be for a good reason; they simply don't have the manpower to tail people without cause. If they can just slap a GPS tracker on any car without a warrant, it becomes trivial to troll for suspects. Requiring a warrant is perfectly reasonable: If they have probable cause, they can ask a judge for a warrant. They can still install the device secretly, so the suspect isn't aware of it, but there is some level of oversight. If police aren't constrained, they *will* overstep their bounds, because their goal is to catch lawbreakers, not protect rights. It's not maliciousness (in most cases), they just prioritize law enforcement. We have judges, theoretically, to act as a check on that power, to ensure that the pursuit of lawbreakers does not unduly affect the innocent. Requiring a warrant is a perfectly reasonable way to do this.
You're not mistaken. But it demonstrates the exact problems I mentioned. When viewing sites in IE Tab, you lose all the Firefox functionality below the level of tab separation. You need plugins for each, the behavior of different tabs doesn't match (I hate losing find-as-you-type for instance), etc.
And like I noted before, the IE Tab users (usually) know what they are getting into; they have to explicitly opt in on each site. The Chrome Frame users won't be aware, as they would include a large percentage of the entire Google user base. And they don't control which sites use it; the web authors who do the blind copy'n'paste I mentioned will make the decision. It's annoying enough to lose functionality when I visit a site in IE Tab. It would be worse to experience it randomly as I browse.
Add-ons for Firefox are much more restricted than they used to be, and as a result are (usually) more stable. And since they are supposed to state versions supported, they usually deactivate cleanly for untested versions of Firefox. As for real plugins, aside from one or two major releases (none in the last year) I've rarely seen a plugin that didn't work identically after upgrade. Most browsers have some plugin compatibility problems after a major release.
The plugin soup is more of a problem if the browser behaves drastically differently as a result of the plugin. With Chrome Frame, most plugins for IE will not work with a page rendered in the Chrome Frame. Multiple copies of the plugin would need to be installed (e.g. Flash), or certain functionality that was only implemented for one browser would not be available in one or the other (e.g. some random third party text box spell checker).
Except Firefox addons are not *necessary* to use any commonly accessed websites (AdBlock Plus and NoScript may be desirable, but not necessary). As such, the people who install them are expected to be aware of potential incompatibility and can disable them if needed (for example, if AdBlock Plus blocks critical elements of a site, you can whitelist the necessary element, or just disable it on the specified site). The required knowledge level to install an addon usually means they know the basic troubleshooting needed to fix addon related problems.
If Google decides that a large number of its services require Chrome Frame, people without the necessary knowledge will be installing it to use those services. And unlike the Firefox addon users, most of them won't be competent enough to troubleshoot any problems that arise from the combined renderer, or even understand the source of the problem.
In addition, it would not surprise me to see a number of sites add the metatag without realizing the implications. Too many web developers are hacks, copying any pasting random junk from forums, reading tips out of guidebooks without understanding the context, etc. If their site's JavaScript is too slow, and a forum post says "Add this metatag to improve JavaScript performance," they'll add it without checking to see if their page is Chrome compatible.
Wow. I was off on a number of things. Mods, please mod my GP post Overrated so misinformation doesn't spread (I've got karma to blow in any event).
As for reversible computing, the Wikipedia is rather problematic. It implies power savings are possible, but the only example of a reversible system it gives (Undo operations in a word processor) are clearly not the ideal; they add to the power usage, rather than subtracting, since they cost additional memory to save state. Given the highly theoretical bent of the article, I'm not seeing this as a practical solution in the next decade or so.
The problem is the apps. Running an application means you are using the CPU, memory and/or networking functionality more often. On a smartphone that is used only intermittently for e-mail, the cost is small. If you are running a realtime GPS directions app for an hour at a time, you're using a hell of a lot more. Then add games, fully JavaScript-compatible web browsers, etc. It adds up. Even a normal cell phone runs down the battery an order of magnitude faster while talking than while it's sitting in your pocket. Running apps is more demanding, and consequently the power drains ever faster.
Feel free to try convincing people to lug around massive batteries and/or wear power generation harnesses just to use a phone.
I know nothing about quantum well diodes, but the screens are already LED on virtually all smart phones. And their power draw would be negligible when not in use, so I doubt they have much of an influence. Pushing computing out of the phone wouldn't save much; the cost of maintaining an active connection to the network at all times would be substantially higher than the small gains made from using a lower power chip (the chips are already fairly low power). Keep in mind, there would still need to be *a* chip to do the work of maintaining the network connection and drawing to the screen; if it's just bitmap copies, then you need a lot of network communication (and possibly decompression work), if it's drawing primitives, you need more drawing capability to turn them into screen images.
Many of the more powerful apps are already in the cloud, there's not that much left to push out.